A templating solution ?
I am curious if you would be interested in a templating solution as opposed to manually constructing the DOM using strings in the js, which is somewhat cumbersome.
I would be willing to contribute in this regard, but firstly wanted to discuss about about your opinion/preferences.
Yes, this would definitively be an improvement.
I want to keep to possibility to craft parts of the UI "by hand" for performance intensive sections (log view, diff view), but I totaly agree that it would be really useful for other parts of the UI.
I already looked for some options and Handlebars catched my attention. But I'm open to other propositions
I would definitely recommend ReactJS. It has a couple of really important benefits, from which I would highlight high performance and ease of maintenance.
UI will be getting more and more complex over time, and React handles this really well. Basically it allows you to express your interface as a pure function of data, and when the data changes it will update DOM in most efficient way.